An 87-year-old scientist may have just unlocked the secret to growing rice in saltwater

Scientists in China have developed more than 200 new
strains of high-yield, saltwater-tolerant rice.The research team hopes the crops will eventually be
grown in boggy swamps and coastal areas, and feed as many as
200 million people.Recent tests were conducted in diluted salt water that
has roughly 10% of the level of salt naturally found in sea
water.

Yuan Longping, an 87-year-old Chinese scientist, has spent his
life working to feed a world
hungry for rice. Now he's wading into saltier territory.

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Longping is developing a new high-yield strain of rice that can
grow in saltwater paddies.

The traditional process of cultivating rice requires a field to
be flooded with a supply of fresh water. Only a fraction of
China's total land area can be farmed this way, since much of the
soil has salt in it from coastal flooding and tides. In the
region of Dongying on China's eastern coast, for example, nearly
40% of the land now has salt content above .5%, according to the
World Bank. (China nonetheless produces more rice than any
other country, however.)

Growing rice in swamps, bogs, and clay-like or salty coastal
waters, which comprise about a third of the total arable land in
China, has typically been impossible because salt stresses the
plants. That makes photosynthesis and respiration a challenge for
the stalks, causing them to stop growing and die. An increasing
amount of land is expected to face this problem as
sea levels rise.

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If Chinese farmers can start planting rice in the vast salty
swaths of their country, however, that could dramatically
increase the country's food supply.

Early success

Longping's first test results look promising: A crop
of 200 different saltwater-tolerant strains of rice that his
research group grew this year yielded up to 8,030 pounds of rice
per acre, according to China's
Xinhua News Agency.

Growing rice in saltwater would also free up stretches of soil
that's currently devoted to rice for other crops. Chinese diets
are changing as more affluent consumers
demand more meat and fewer grains, but space to raise
livestock and vegetables is limited, since so much of China's
arable land is reserved for rice.

"That could, of course, have a huge impact on the overall food
security and supply in China," Ren Wang, assistant director
general for agriculture at the United Nations' Food and
Agriculture Organization, told Business Insider.

Longping's initial success came just as the 2017
global rice production forecast has taken a downturn. South
Korea and Sri Lanka are suffering from "abnormal dryness,"
according to the UN FAO, while
Bangladesh recently experienced some of the worst flooding to
hit South Asia in a decade.
India and Nepal were hit by both floods and droughts this
year, so are also expecting rice prices to tick up.

Feeding 200 million people

But although Longping's experimental planting, which
was conducted at the Qingdao Saline-Alkali Tolerant Rice
Research and Development Center on the Yellow Sea, showed
the rice was able to grow in sea-like water, the salt
concentration was diluted.

"It's still only maybe 10% the level of salt in sea water," Wang
said, cautioning that the rice is still "quite far" from any
practical application for farmers.

The Chinese research team behind the new strain hopes that in
three to five years, they'll be able to produce enough of the
saltwater-powered grain to feed 200 million Chinese people, and
possibly hundreds of millions more around the world. Wang says
the technique could also be adopted in other areas, including
Bangladesh, Vietnam and parts of Africa.

The goal sounds lofty, but Longping knows a thing or two about
how to grow new kinds of rice. The Chinese researcher won the
2004 World Food Prize for his work on some of the first
high-yield hybrid rice varieties that were developed in the
1970s, which helped shift his country from food deficient to food
secure.

New breeds

Rice has been a staple crop for more than 7,000 years, and today,
more than half of the world's population relies on the
fingernail-sized grain for sustenance, according to the United
Nations. High-yield varieties like those Longping has developed
feed more mouths than traditional techniques, but are also more
energy-intensive and require more non-organic fertilizer.

With the saltwater technique, rice growers are hoping to cut back
on energy use. One successful strain, called Green Super Rice,
has been shown to grow in salty water and is already being
cultivated with some success in the Philippines. It's more
environmentally
friendly than typical high-yield rice, and it fetches a
higher price due to its high-quality, reddish grains, according
to the International
Rice Research Institute.

In addition to increasing the total volume of rice that can be
produced, rice grown in saltwater may offer health benefits,
since there's more calcium and other micronutrients in alkaline
waters.

But the scientists will have to make sure that consumers actually
want to eat this new rice.

The saltwater-tolerant strains in China were developed with
crosses from wild rice relatives, and Wang says he hasn't found
any detailed report on the rice quality. That makes him skeptical
about how the new breeds taste.